Who is the body in the barrel discovered the other day in Lake Mead

[Uforeality]

The body was wearing cheap clothes. Was it K-Mart they said?

[Snakes]

The body was wearing cheap clothes. Was it K-Mart they said?

Dead beat behind on his debts lol

[Uforeality]

The skeleton obviously has a bullet hole in its skull. The person was fully clothed when placed in the barrel. This sounds like an obvious gangland hit. But mobsters aren't the only ones who kill people.

[baldo]

Oscar Goodman weighs in:

https://nypost.com/2022/05/10/bodies-su ... las-vegas/

[Uforeality]

Oscar Goodman weighs in:

https://nypost.com/2022/05/10/bodies-su ... las-vegas/

Las Vegas was crawling with gangsters in the 60's thru the early 80's. This could be the work of many of families... if it was even a mob hit. So many variables right now.

[mike68]

Help me lift him, we'll take him down the Pine Barrens before they build a condo here.....Georgie!!

[JerryB]

From the Las Vegas Sun, Tuesday, May 10, 2022
By Ken Ritter, Associated Press

Bodies surfacing in Lake Mead recall mob’s time in Las Vegas

Las Vegas is being flooded with lore about organized crime after a second set of human remains emerged within a week from the depths of a drought-stricken Colorado River reservoir just a 30-minute drive from the notoriously mob-founded Strip.

“There’s no telling what we’ll find in Lake Mead,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Monday. “It’s not a bad place to dump a body."

Goodman, as a lawyer, represented mob figures including the ill-fated Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro before serving three terms as a martini-toting mayor making public appearances with a showgirl on each arm.

He declined to name names about who might turn up in the vast reservoir formed by Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona.

“I’m relatively sure it was not Jimmy Hoffa,” he laughed. But he added that a lot of his former clients seemed interested in “climate control” — mob speak for keeping the lake level up and bodies down in their watery graves.

Instead, the world now has climate change, and the surface of Lake Mead has dropped more than 170 feet (52 meters) since 1983.

The lake that slakes the thirst of 40 million people in cities, farms and tribes across seven Southwestern states is down to about 30% of capacity.

“If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface,” observed Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor whose father dealt blackjack for decades at casinos including the Stardust and the Showboat.

“I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,” Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His assassin has never been identified.

“But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,” Green said.

First, the dropping lake level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake on April 25, forcing the regional water authority to switch to a deep-lake intake it completed in 2020 to continue to supply casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists per year.

The following weekend, boaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline.

The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police say he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him. The death is being investigated as a homicide.

A few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty.

On Saturday, two sisters from suburban Henderson who were paddle boarding on the lake near a former marina resort noticed bones on a newly surfaced sand bar more than 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) from the barrels.

Lindsey Melvin, who took photos of their find, said they thought at first it was the skeleton of a bighorn sheep native to the region. A closer look revealed a human jaw with teeth. They called park rangers, and the National Park Service confirmed in a statement that the bones were human.

There was no immediate evidence of foul play, Las Vegas police said Monday, and they are not investigating. A homicide probe would be opened if the Clark County coroner determines the death was suspicious, the department said in a statement.

More bodies will be discovered, predicted Geoff Schumacher, vice president of The Mob Museum, a renovated historic downtown Las Vegas post office and federal building that opened in 2012 as The National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement.

“I think a lot of these individuals will likely have been drowning victims,” Schumacher said, referring to boaters and swimmers who’ve never been found. “But a barrel has a signature of a mob hit. Stuffing a body in a barrel. Sometimes they would dump it in the water.”

He and Green both cited the death of John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, a mid-1950s Las Vegas mobster who disappeared in 1976 a few days before his body was found in a 55-gallon (208-liter) steel drum floating off the coast of Miami.

David Kohlmeier, a former police officer who now co-hosts a Las Vegas podcast and fledgling TV show called “The Problem Solver Show,” said Monday that after offering a $5,000 reward last week for qualified divers to find barrels in the lake, he heard from people in San Diego and Florida willing to try.

But National Park Service officials said that's not allowed, and that there are hundreds of barrels in the depths — some dating to the construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Kohlmeier said he also heard from families of missing people and about cases like a man suspected of killing his mother and brother in 1987, a hotel employee who disappeared in 1992, and a father from Utah who vanished in the 1980s.

“You’ll probably find remains all throughout Lake Mead,” Kohlmeier said, including Native Americans who were the area's earliest inhabitants.

Green said the discoveries have people talking not only about mob hits, but about bringing relief and closure to grieving families. Not to mention the ever-growing white mineral markings on steep lake walls showing where water used to be.

“People will talk about this for the right reasons and the wrong reasons,” the professor said. “They’re going to think we’re going to solve every mob murder. In fact, we may see some.

"But it’s also worth remembering that the mob did not like murders to take place in the Las Vegas area, because they did not like bad publicity going out under the Las Vegas dateline.”

The right reason, Green said, is the visible evidence that the West has a serious water problem. "The ‘bathtub ring’ around the lake is big and getting bigger,” he said.

Whatever story emerges about the body in the barrel, Goodman predicted it will add to the lore of a city that, with lake water, sprouted from a creosote bush-covered desert to become a marquee gambling mecca.

“When I was the mayor, every time I went to a ground breaking, I’d begin to shake for fear that somebody I may have run into over the years will be uncovered,” he said.

“We have a very interesting background," Goodman added. “It certainly adds to the mystique of Las Vegas.”
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/may/1 ... s-time-in/

[Ed]

Jeff Burbank and Geoff Schumacher from The Mob Museum give their two cents on the likely murder victim and culprit.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ITMAN.html

[Ivan]

Thanks for the thread guys. I live down the street from this craziness but have been so busy with some delightful oral surgery (having holes drilled into the bones under your gums is a real treat) that I somehow missed all these fun times.

[PolackTony]

Jeff Burbank and Geoff Schumacher from The Mob Museum give their two cents on the likely murder victim and culprit.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ITMAN.html

Given the cheap clothes, I doubt it was Pappas.

[JerryB]

By Simon Romero, The New York Times Company
Saturday, May 21, 2022

It’s the mob guy who went missing after skimming from the Stardust. No, it’s the lake resort manager hunted down by the Chicago Outfit. Could it be the work of a biker gang muscling in on Mafia turf? Or maybe someone just fell off a boat after one too many.

Ever since bodies started turning up this month in Lake Mead — the first in a barrel, the next half-buried in sand, both exposed by plunging water levels — theories are flourishing about who they are, how they wound up in the country’s largest man-made reservoir, and what might surface next.

Lynette Melvin found the second body with her sister while paddleboarding. At first, they thought they had stumbled onto bones of a bighorn sheep. “It wasn’t until I saw the jawbone with a silver filling that I was like, ‘Whoa, this is human,’ and started to freak out,” Melvin, 30, said.

The discovery of human remains is always a source of tragedy and potential pain for loved ones — especially when they show signs of a violent end. But in Las Vegas, macabre fascination and amateur sleuthing have quickly followed.

As Melvin put it, “There’s a whole lot of mystery around them.”

The somber findings come amid the Southwest’s driest two decades in more than 1,000 years as drought-starved bodies of water yield one surprise after another.

At Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, a bachelor party stumbled across a fossilized mastodon skull that is millions of years old. In Utah last year, the receding waters of Lake Powell revealed a car that had plunged 600 feet off a cliff, killing the driver. And as Lake Powell dries up, archaeologists are getting a chance to study newly emerged Indigenous dwellings.

In Las Vegas, the obsession with the Lake Mead remains combines anxiety about the city’s dwindling water supply with the fascination over how mobsters shaped the Mojave Desert outpost into a glittering gambling haven, where pleasure-seekers float down lazy rivers and frolic in colossal pools amid the parched landscape.

Now just 30% full, Lake Mead has already fallen to its lowest level since it was filled during the Great Depression, raising fears in places such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., that also draw water from the reservoir

made by Hoover Dam, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas.

Federal authorities announced this month they would delay releases from Lake Powell, another reservoir along the Colorado River, dwindling Lake Mead even more.

Jennifer Byrnes, a forensic anthropologist who consults with the Clark County coroner’s office, said warming temperatures could reshape her profession. Long-term drought and other changes to the landscape make more grim discoveries possible and require planning for mass casualty events like deadly heat waves, storms and wildfires.

“Climate change is directly going to affect our field in the coming years,” said Byrnes, who is also an assistant professor at UNLV.

In some instances, that means help putting down old cases. After a pickup truck with a female body inside was found in a receding lake in Texas in 2014, officials used dental records to identify a woman who had been missing since 1979.

Still, Byrnes said, human remains found in places like Lake Mead could be especially challenging. The reservoir is so large that its currents can circulate a body far from where it drowned or was dumped and cause it to break apart. A body in a container like a barrel, she said, could decompose faster than one exposed to water. And scavengers like water bugs, crabs, fish and birds can complicate efforts to determine identities and causes of death.

None of that has stopped amateur sleuths from poring over clues inSouthern Nevada’s hottest new cold cases. So far, police investigators have said they dod not expect foul play in connection with the body found by the paddleboarders.

But Metro Police detectives said the victim in the barrel appeared to have died from a gunshot wound, likely in the mid-1970s or early 1980s based on clothing and footwear.

At the time, even as local authorities sought to downplay the influence of organized crime syndicates, mobsters from Midwest cities like Chicago, Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo., wielded immense clout around Las Vegas. Today, the Mafia’s role in Las Vegas is considered insignificant, but nostalgia for the era of made men has emerged as a big moneymaker.

For $119.95, visitors can take a “mob tour” that features sites where a car bombing and other underworld activities took place. At the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas, tourists take in exhibitions describing the city’s blood-splattered past.

“This is the town that denied having any connections to the mob,” said John L. Smith, 62, a prominent author and columnist whose family has been in Nevada since the 1880s. “Now it’s a town that puts it on billboards.”

As the museum makes clear, barrels were not unheard-of among the Mafia’s body-disposal methods. In 1976, John Roselli, a crime figure with Las Vegas ties, was found floating dead in one in Biscayne Bay outside Miami. And Smith said in a column in The Nevada Independent that the discovery in Lake Mead also evoked memories of a cold case involving Johnny Pappas, a Chicagoan who went missing in Las Vegas in 1976.

Pappas, whose underworld associations were noted when he disappeared, managed a resort on Lake Mead backed by a Teamsters pension fund and had been involved in Democratic politics. “Back then, Las Vegas was a much smaller town where half the people were connected or wanted you to think they were connected” to the mob, Smith said.

Other theories about the bodies also abound. David Kohlmeier, a retired police officer who is now a podcaster and social media personality, is offering a $5,000 reward to divers who find other remains in Lake Mead. The areas where the two bodies were found, he said, could have been dumping grounds connected to other crimes. “I think this was gang-related in some way, but that could mean it was a motorcycle gang,” Kohlmeier said.

Either way, Travis Heggie, a former public risk management specialist for the U.S. National Park Service, said that Lake Mead stood out among national recreation areas and parks for its potential connection to criminal activity — along with places like Big Bend National Park on the border with Mexico.

“The criminal element of Las Vegas simply spills over into Lake Mead,” said Heggie, who has long been fascinated about what lies at the reservoir’s depths. Even if no more barrels with bodies in them turn up, he said, “there’s going to be a lot of guns and a lot of knives.”

The lake also guards the wreckage of a B-29 Superfortress — one of the largest aircraft used in World War II — that crashed into its waters in 1948, as well as a stunning complex of Ancestral Puebloan ruins, including a structure with more than 100 rooms.

Hikers can already trek to St. Thomas, a once-submerged Mormon settlement that has resurfaced in Lake Mead in the form of sun-bleached ruins as the drought grinds on.

While Lake Mead has long seen mishaps and foul play, Michael Green, 57, a historian who grew up in Las Vegas, noted that mob figures often preferred to carry out execution-style killings away from the city, in efforts to shield the gambling industry from bad publicity.

In one notorious cold case, the influential president of the Riviera hotel, Gus Greenbaum, and his wife, Bess, were shot dead at their Phoenix home after suspicions surfaced that he had been stealing from fellow investors.

Green — whose father was a casino dealer with the distinction of being fired by Lefty Rosenthal, the inspiration for the gangster portrayed by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film, “Casino” — has his own theory about the body in the barrel.

It revolves around Jay Vandermark, a slots supervisor at the Stardust who was implicated in a scheme to skim proceeds from slot machines. Vandermark, also thought to have pocketed funds from his mob bosses, went missing in 1976.

“I don’t think they ever found the body,” Green said[/].
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/may/2 ... of-wise-g/

[Wiseguy]

Looks like they found a third body, though details are scarce. The article theorizes these people could have been victims of drowning, though something tells me at least the one in the barrel wasn't.

https://www.newsweek.com/lake-mead-thir ... am-1728305

[dixiemafia]

Looks like they found a third body, though details are scarce. The article theorizes these people could have been victims of drowning, though something tells me at least the one in the barrel wasn't.

https://www.newsweek.com/lake-mead-thir ... am-1728305

I guess if he was put into the barrel alive he could have drowned